These are gloomy times for an inauguration. In Newsweek, Evan Thomas asks: On Monday, can the president rise to the occasion with a historically inspiring message?

This is what the 'second coming' refers to. It's a play on words.

Look at this God-like comparison in the second paragraph:

Obama’s inaugural address was widely seen as a bit of a letdown. “A hodgepodge,” wrote John Judis in The New Republic. There were no particularly memorable phrases or flights of rhetoric. At one point, Obama seemed to play the scold, quoting Scripture that “the time has come to put aside childish things.” Some observers speculated that Obama had intentionally wished to lower expectations raised by his dreams of “hope and change” during the campaign.

what's unbelievable to me (though it shouldn't be by now) is that none of you dopes bothered to look past the cover and read the article about which is about Obama's 2nd inauguration speech and his 2nd term in office

I know all the geniuses here can't wait to do that so I've copied it for you so you don't have to be bothered to go look for it

These are gloomy times for an inauguration. In Newsweek, Evan Thomas asks: On Monday, can the president rise to the occasion with a historically inspiring message?

The last Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 2009, dawned bright and cold. More than a million people, possibly the largest live audience ever to see a president inaugurated, and certainly the biggest since Lyndon Johnson’s inauguration in 1965, streamed to the Washington Mall for Barack Obama’s oath-taking as the 44th president of the United States. Even the most jaded old Washington hands could feel a different vibe in the crowd—people seemed excited, happy, some teary-eyed to witness, for the first time in history, an African-American sworn in as chief executive.

Obama’s inaugural address was widely seen as a bit of a letdown. “A hodgepodge,” wrote John Judis in The New Republic. There were no particularly memorable phrases or flights of rhetoric. At one point, Obama seemed to play the scold, quoting Scripture that “the time has come to put aside childish things.” Some observers speculated that Obama had intentionally wished to lower expectations raised by his dreams of “hope and change” during the campaign.

Not exactly, says Adam Frankel, a former Obama White House speechwriter who worked on the address. “It’s not like we considered writing a soaring speech and decided not to. But there was also a recognition, a new sense of responsibility to talk to people ‘where they are,’ as [Obama adviser] David Axelrod put it— to give them a sense of hope without being Pollyanna-ish,” Frankel told me.

Frankel recalled that before the president’s first inauguration, during a meeting at the Obama campaign’s Chicago headquarters, the president-elect had told his staff he wanted an address that would place the moment in history. Frankel found one model, as recounted by historian David McCullough, in the words Gen. George Washington, after crossing the Delaware in December 1776, had used to inspire and rally his frozen and demoralized troops. And Obama tried to invoke that spirit, urging Americans to rise above “petty grievances and false promises,” and culminating with a rousing finale nodding to Thomas Paine: “With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come.”

Four years ago, standing in the chilly air, the vast outdoor audience assembled before the west front of the Capitol may have been momentarily moved. Yet in his first term, the president himself did not, perhaps could not, live up to his own words. Those who know him say he was burdened—and hardened—by the constant political infighting in Washington.

Now Obama has a second chance at an inaugural. The task is perhaps more daunting, to find a way to inspire and uplift, but also to speak to people “where they are”—distrustful of government, worried about their future, unsure their president will have any more luck fixing Washington’s dysfunctional culture in his second term than he did in his first. Obama risks sounding like a phony if he tries too hard for words meant to be cut in marble. On the other hand, he can’t show how tired and frustrated he must really feel.

A president who is writing (or, more likely, editing and refining) his inaugural address is confronted with a very difficult challenge: how to speak in his own true voice while at the same time speaking for every man and woman. The challenge to be at once unique and universal has defeated virtually all of Obama’s predecessors. With a few memorable ­exceptions—like JFK’s, Lincoln’s second, FDR’s first (“the only thing to fear is fear itself”)—inaugural addresses have long disappointed their expectant listeners. The words rarely live up to the occasion. Most inaugural addresses “tend not to be very good,” says presidential historian Michael Beschloss. “The best rhetoric has been used up in the campaign, and presidents don’t want to promise too much. They are planning to give their first State of the Union addresses in a few weeks and they don’t want to preempt. Plus, most presidents are not good speakers or writers.”

Generally, they get help—maybe, too much help. Inaugural addresses often read like awkward or banal contrivances because they are so often inauthentic. For the first inaugural, Washington, a man of few words, reached out to James Madison, a man of perhaps too many words, to draft the speech. The result was a prolix jumble that is almost painfully self-effacing. In a crush of fractured syntax, Washington spoke of “the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies.” Whew.

For his inaugural two centuries later, Lyndon Johnson turned to the novelist John Steinbeck, who had been an acquaintance of his wife, Lady Bird. LBJ wanted poetry, but he got the leavings of a burned-out literary genius. “LBJ had cried at the movie of Steinbeck’s book The Grapes of Wrath,” explains Besch­loss. “In the inaugural address Johnson used Steinbeck phrases like ‘I do not believe the Great Society is the ordered, changeless, and sterile battalion of ants.’ It sounded nothing like LBJ.”

Bill Clinton “was always reaching out,” recalls his chief speechwriter, Michael Waldman. For his first inaugural, Clinton called on old JFK and LBJ hands Ted Sorensen, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Richard Goodwin, as well as Martin Luther King’s biographer, Taylor Branch, to offer some language. The drafting of the speech was chaotic; Clinton pulled an all-nighter and was making changes at the last second. "The speech was underrated," said Waldman, though he conceded that Clinton's second inaugural was "written by a committee. It tried too hard for grandeur, to be poetic. Second inaugurals are usually pretty bad," he acknowledged."Richard Nixon actually wrote many of his own speeches, often laboring over them for days. Ever the grind, Nixon read every one of his predecessors’ inaugural addresses, concluding that “only the short ones are remembered,” according to a memoir by his speechwriter Ray Price. Scarcely able to conceal his envy of Kennedy, Nixon tried to echo the ringing phrases of JFK’s inaugural address (“Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans ...”) Unfortunately, out of Nixon’s mouth, the phrasing fell flat: “Let all nations know that during this administration our lines of communication will be open.”

Kennedy’s inaugural address in January 1961 remains the modern gold standard for inspiring speeches—and the inspiration for thousands of poor imitations. The words still ring: “And so my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Though the speech was largely crafted by Kennedy’s superb speechwriter Sorensen, Kennedy contributed some of the words: he was channeling his old prep-school headmaster, Seymour St. John of Choate. (“Ask not what Choate can do for you—ask what you can do for Choate.”) On the eve of the inaugural, Kennedy was feeling insecure about the speech. He fretted that it would not live up to the greats. “It won’t be as good as Jefferson’s,” Kennedy sighed to a friend on the eve of his inauguration.

It’s hard to imagine that JFK closely read Jefferson’s speeches. Jefferson’s first inaugural is famous for its call to rise above partisanship—“We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” said Jefferson—but both his first and second inaugural addresses are windy and wandering, dense and ornate, and virtually unreadable today.

The one inaugural address that seems timeless is Lincoln’s second. It succeeds, above all, because it is honest. It truly reflects Lincoln’s own struggles with God’s purpose. After his death in April 1865, just a month after his second inaugural, a piece of paper was found in Lincoln’s desk drawer. “The paper said that God exists,” recalls Beschloss, “But it notes that if God were on the side of the Union, the war would have been over sooner.” Lincoln’s speech captured his existential grappling: “Both [sides] read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each evokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces”—Lincoln’s description of slavery—“but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”

If God so willed, Lincoln vowed to continue the war “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” But he ended tenderly, fervently: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds ...”

Lincoln’s overall tone is humble—that of a man who has learned from harsh experience. It may be revealing that presidential farewell addresses sometimes seem more convincing than inaugurals. Humility is a lesson that presidents often are forced to learn on the job. Washington was hardly lacking in ego. He was called “His Excellency” during the Revolution, and “he rather liked the title His High Mightiness,” writes historian Robert Remini in his collection of inaugural addresses, Fellow Citizens. But in his farewell address, Washington warned that America should be humble in its global ambitions—to “steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” By far Dwight Eisenhower’s most memorable speech came at the end of his presidency—­warning against “the military-industrial complex” that had grown up over the course of Eisenhower’s Cold War presidency.

By contrast, inaugurals, hoping to inspire, have sometimes tended to overreach. JFK’s glorious inaugural speech was, in hindsight, a prescription for disaster. By promising that America “shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty,” he overcommitted American power and prestige. (Less than three months later, as a CIA-backed invasion of Cuba was failing at the Bay of Pigs, JFK woke up weeping, according to his wife, Jacqueline.) In a similar vein, George W. Bush’s second inaugural is a beautiful paean to liberty: he presented “the moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right.” But by stating that “it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world,” Bush glossed over the costs and burdens of such an expansive global role.

Obama can be stubborn and willful, but he will need to compromise and perhaps lower expectations to accomplish much in his second term. Perhaps he could learn from Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush. The elder Bush had been full of bombast—“Read my lips: No new taxes!”—when he accepted the GOP nomination in New Orleans in August 1988. But by his inauguration in January 1989 he was already looking for a way to climb off his high horse. He offered his hand to the Democratic leaders in Congress, and even had written into the transcript of his speech a spontaneous shout-out to the Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Dan Rostenkowski (“Hey, Danny!”).

Admittedly, this sort of hail-fellow bonhomie is not really Obama’s style. The 44th president does not like to glad-hand. But he can be playful and even fun if the mood moves him, and he can be convincing and profound when he speaks on a subject close to his heart. Obama’s take it-or-leave-it arrogance in the “fiscal cliff” talks before New Year’s masks his more subtle intelligence. Obama may not be the second coming of Lincoln (first-term hype notwithstanding), and our times are hardly as desperate as the Civil War. But it’s a good bet that Obama is more ambivalent than he lets on about the proper road to fostering prosperity while at the same time cutting red ink, a challenge that divides the best economists. If his second inaugural address succeeds, it will be because the president has delivered a speech that is not chilly or self-­righteous, but at once warm and understanding as well as honest and true. You have to go back to Eisenhower and maybe all the way back to Teddy Roose­velt to find a president who had a successful second term. Most Americans want Obama to succeed. They will be watching and listening for him to strike the right first note.

oh look the author used the term "2nd coming" and even talked about resurrection.

I guess this author MUST be talking about religion

what else could it be ??

SMU Football's Second ComingBy Paul Wachter on November 10, 2011http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/smu-footballs-second-coming-11102011.htmlAfter two-plus decades of incompetence, the Southern Methodist University football team, with a 6-3 record, seems primed for its third-straight bowl appearance, a result that might tempt sportswriters to reach into the deep well of the trade’s clichés and call it a “resurrection.” In a manner of speaking, the team has returned from the grave. In 1987, after the Mustangs’ flagrant violations of National Collegiate Athletic Assn. regulations were exposed, SMU became the first and only football program to be slapped with what is colloquially known as the death penalty.

But the story of SMU’s second coming, like its earlier fall, is more about money than miracles. To build an early-1980s juggernaut—which included an undefeated season in 1983—SMU’s boosters set up a slush fund to pay players. The illicit payments continued even after the school was placed on probation and happened with the full knowledge and encouragement of university officials (including then Texas Governor Bill Clements, who served on SMU’s board). When the NCAA’s guillotine fell, SMU’s 1987 season was canceled and the number of athletic scholarships the school could bestow for the five following years was severely limited. Over the next 20 years, SMU mustered only one winning season. “It was a very harsh penalty for a very egregious case,” says NCAA spokesman Bob Williams.

Nearly every football season, it seems, is overshadowed by past misdeeds. Although the death penalty has not been invoked against another program, it now threatens the University of Miami, in light of accusations that its players for years accepted payments (and in some cases prostitutes) from convicted Ponzi-schemer Nevin Shapiro. But if SMU’s long, arduous rise from disgrace provides a lesson, it’s that, in college football at least, there can be life after death. And while boosters can’t necessarily buy players for a collegiate program anymore—they can buy nearly everything else.

It began with a new stadium. SMU’s home games were played outside its Dallas campus at the Cotton Bowl and at Texas Stadium, home of the NFL’s Cowboys. In post-death-penalty years, playing in those massive arenas could be embarrassing. The 1998 game against Texas Christian University, SMU’s archrival in nearby Fort Worth, drew just 26,000 fans—a large swath of them clad in TCU purple—who occupied a mere third of the Cotton Bowl’s capacity.

In 2000 the 32,000-seat Gerald J. Ford stadium and the adjacent Paul B. Lloyd, Jr. All-Sports Center were completed at a total cost of $56.8 million, much of it donated by two businessmen who sit on SMU’s board of trustees. (Ford is a billionaire banker, not a former U.S. President; Lloyd is an oilman.) At first glance the west side of Ford Stadium, which is partially sunk into the ground, seems to consist largely of air-conditioned luxury boxes, where individual suites go for $40,000 per year.

Every big-time football program also needs a big-time coach. In 2008, SMU’s athletic director, Steve Orsini, courted June Jones, head coach of the University of Hawaii and formerly of the Atlanta Falcons, known for his swaggering, run-and-shoot offense. Orsini invited 20 boosters to join SMU’s “Circle of Champions” and to each commit $100,000 per year for five years. “We needed a guy who was a proven recruiter,” says Lloyd, a Circle donor who played for the Mustangs in the 1960s.

Jones arrived on campus with a five-year, $10 million contract, making him the highest-paid coach in Conference USA—or in any conference that lacks automatic consideration for a Bowl Championship Series bid. But that’s what winning takes, argues Jones. “They paid me a lot of money,” he says, “and that commitment alone changes the dynamics of everything.”

During Jones’s first season, SMU finished 1-and-11. But in 2009 the Mustangs went 8-5 and routed Nevada 45-10 in the Sheraton Hawaii Bowl Championship, SMU’s first bowl victory in 25 years. Last year in something of a relapse, SMU fell to Army, 16-14, in the Armed Forces Bowl, after a 7-7 season. The Mustangs began their 2011 season with a tough loss to Texas A&M and then rebounded with five straight wins, including a 40-33 overtime upset over TCU, a team that went undefeated last season and beat the University of Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl. The victory was particularly meaningful since, as Orsini points out, SMU had in recent years closely followed TCU’s path to redemption.

“We had massive infractions, too, back around the time of [SMU’s] death penalty,” says TCU Athletic Director Chris Del Conte. TCU then built a new stadium and hired a respected coach. The success on the field drove admissions, Del Conte says. “In 1998, we had 4,500 applications for 1,600 spots, and now there are 20,000 applicants each year, and alumni giving is up,” he says. “Our sports success has driven our recognition.”

SMU President R. Gerald Turner insists that investing in SMU football is compatible with the overall rise of the university’s profile, though that seems hard to square with his position as co-chairman of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, which agitates against “the commercialization of college sports” at the expense of “the underlying goals of higher education.” But in his office, he points to a brick that’s inscribed with the number “1300.” “Our average SAT score was 1144 when I got here. This year it’ll be around 1260, and our goal is 1300 by 2015,” he says.

The money spent on returning SMU to football prominence could be better used elsewhere, argues anthropology professor Caroline Brettell. “Ford Stadium is used six times a year,” she says. “I look up at the luxury sky boxes, and I think, ‘We should hold classes in there.’ ” James Hopkins, a history professor and Texas native who has taught at SMU for 37 years, says he believes in Turner’s commitment to the academic advancement of the institution. “But the relationship between big-time college athletics and the core academic mission of the institution is inherently a perilous one,” he says. “The death penalty left a black mark on the entire institution, which took years to recover. I look at the recent football scandals at Miami and Ohio State, and as a historian I think that it can happen again here, too.”